Ronald Reagan Was Right All Along

October 04, 1990|By Terry Przybylski.

DES PLAINES — Ten years after Poland`s Solidarity movment is launched in the Gdansk shipyard, Ronald Reagan pays a visit there, receives a hero`s welcome and is embraced by Lech Walesa. ``Your position, firmness and consistency,`` Walesa tells the former president, ``meant help and hope for us in the most difficult moments.`` At the shipyard gate, a crowd stands cheering and chanting,

``Reagan! Reagan! Reagan!``

Three years after he challenges Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, Ronald Reagan goes to Berlin and is greeted by a throng of admiring Berliners, who did the job themselves without waiting for Gorbachev`s help. They cheer Reagan, give him gifts and clamor for his autograph. As he walks through the Brandenburg Gate, the shouts go up, ``Thank you, Mr. Reagan!``

And then Ronald Reagan goes to the Soviet Union, where he is greeted and praised by Gorbachev and invited to lecture students at Moscow State University on the virtues of democracy and free market economics. Says a 21-year-old Russian student afterward, ``He`s great! He impresses me.``

Reading these stories today, I am reminded of a speech I heard President Reagan give at another university, Notre Dame, in May, 1981: ``The West won`t contain communism-it will transcend communism. We won`t bother to denounce it; we`ll just dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history, whose last pages are even now being written.``

To Reagan, and to those of us who steadfastly supported his policies from the beginning and helped turn his prophecy into reality, I now say: Thanks-and congratulations on a job well done. We now have the proof that we were on the right side of history when it counted most.

And then, of course, there are those liberals and leftist radicals who spent years trying to convince us that Soviet communism as practiced by Gorbachev`s predecessors was not such a bad thing, and denouncing Reagan as an evil, bloodthirsty warmonger whose policies constituted the greatest threat to world peace. To them, I say: What do you have to say now? Your silence is deafening.